My week long break from courses is coming up soon, and I have nothing to do for it. So I figured that I would put a day or two towards GeekShed. The only problem is that I don’t know what I should do. This is where you, the users, come into play. Although we always welcome input from our users, whether it’s a comment left here, on the forums, in #help, on twitter, or directly to a staffer, the whole purpose of this post is to solicit ideas on what you would like to see.

Here are the ground rules:

It should have something to do with the website, especially the parts that are driven by WordPress (basically everything except the forums), as that is my primary area of responsibility.

It should be something that can be done in 12-24 hours. My break is only a week long, and as much as I love GeekShed, I don’t want to undertake something that will take the entire break.

It should be something that will benefit the majority of users (i.e. not a post about why people should join your channel).

If there is more than one suggestion, I will probably work on the most popular one, so talk with your friends about it and have them comment too. Don’t let this discourage you from suggesting something though – all suggestions will remain here, as well as the spreadsheet I will be compiling with them. Something that isn’t done now may be worked on at a later point in time.

I will be leaving comments on this post open for a week, at which point I’ll close them and decide which item I will be working on.

If you have any questions or need something clarified, please /join #help and speak with Ryan, or you may post in this topic on the forum. Please leave comments here for suggestions only.

One of the more frequent questions we see is people wondering how do they embed their chatroom on their website, and more often than not, it’s run off of WordPress. Although I wrote this while going through the steps on a site using WordPress, the process should be similar on Drupal, Joomla, or any other CMS.

One thing to note before starting is that you need to be able to post HTML, and not have it filtered. If you are using wordpress.com, or WPMU and are not the site/super admin, your HTML is filtered and you will not be able to see the chat box when you post the post/page you’re trying to put it onto. If you cannot post HTML, it will not work because it will treat the code as text instead.

Having said that, here are 5 easy steps to embedding your chat onto a site.

Get the embed code from our website. At the very minimum, you should change the channel name. Unless you know better dimensions for your site’s layout, it might be best to leave the default size; you can always change that later (it is just two variables in the embed code).

Add a new Page or Post like you normally would, and give it a title. While still in the visual editor (if you use it), feel free to add anything that you would like above and/or below the chat box and associated items.

Next, if you aren’t already in HTML mode, click on the HTML button.

Paste in the code you copied from step 1 in the appropriate place (depending on if you added text for above/below [step 2]). At this point, you will see the code, which may not make sense to you. Click the Save Draft button, then Preview.

Depending on your theme, you might need to change the size of the chat. Once you are happy with how it looks, Publish the post.

Still have questions? Feel free to ask in #help, or post in the forums

There is a concept. This concept is difficult for the author to understand. Some people call it ‘real life’. Sadly, this mischievous beast has gotten in the way once more and our newest staff member, Kyle, has been forced to resign his staff position to pursue further education. This is a great loss to GeekShed and we wish him all the best with his studies.

In an attempt to fill the gaping hole left by Kyle’s resignation, we have asked CCMike to join the GeekShed staff team. He kindly accepted this offer and we are thrilled to have him on the team. CCMike has been on GeekShed and its predecessor for 5+ years and is a great friend to many.

Like any new staff member, Mike has a lot to learn but we are confident that he will take this in his stride.

Every now and then, a question that arises in #help is if people can see the IP address of another individual. Since GeekShed encrypt users’ IP addresses and hostmasks the short answer is no, other people can not see your IP address.

The long answer is the following:

The only people that can see a user’s IP address is the user, and network staff. Anyone else will see an encrypted version of the IP address, or an encrypted version of the hostname if the IP address was able to be resolved.

Examples:

Instead of seeing host127-68-124-93.range127-124.virginmedia.com, other users will see protectedhost-A8B9B24A.range127-124.virginmedia.com

Instead of seeing 134.65.154.12, other users will see AD171E0.223C44F1.789AD83A.IP

Some users claim that they are able to see the IP address of other users. This is incorrect. What they are seeing is the IP address of the page they see when they try to visit a domain that does not resolve.

Examples:

If they claim to know the IP address of a staff member, with the geekshed.net vhost, the IP they really see if that of the server the geekshed.net website resides on.

If a user of OpenDNS claims to know the IP address of the virginmedia user (from the previous example), what they will really see is 208.69.36.132, which actually resolves to hit-nxdomain.opendns.com.

Some clients may resolve the “primary” domain name itself, in which case the user would see 212.250.162.12 for virginmedia.com

Disclaimer: this all goes out the window if the user unsets usermode x, which is the mode that hides their IP address/hostmask. This mode is set by default on connect and is removed either by doing “/umode2 -x” or “/hs off”. If umode x ever gets unset it can be turned back on with “/umode2 +x”